Scheduling Pages in Kentico CMS 

A couple of months ago, a client asked us if it is possible to schedule the publication of a page in advance. At the time I tried it and for some reason it didn’t seem to work, so we left it as something for later.

Two weeks ago I was at the Kentico-Certified-Trainer-training and I asked one of the Kentico guys if this was possible. “Of course”, they said, “You can even schedule multiple pages in advance”. Ok, so I was wrong.

But how do you set it up? It turns out to be really easy.

First, you need to make sure you have workflow turned on. Setting up workflow is part of the Site Manager, to which you may not have access. If so, ask you friendly Kentico Administrator to set it up for you.

1. Open the site manager and click the Development tab.
2. Click Workflows and click next to Default workflow to edit the default workflow.
3. Next, click on the Scope tab so we can select the part of the sitemap where we want to apply the workflow.
4. For this example, we’ll start the scope of this workflow at the root and we will apply the workflow to all document types.  If you want, you can specify something else.
   
5. Click OK to save the scope.

Now you are ready create different versions of pages and schedule them.

To schedule pages we are going to use the publish from/to fields on the Form tab:

To create a new version of a page and schedule it:

1. Edit the page, save it (don’t publish it yet) and click the Form tab.
2. Enter the time you want to publish this version of the page from in the publish from field.
3. Click Publish to publish the page (if you have a workflow with an approval step, you might also need to approve it). Remember that, because you entered a time in the publish from field it will not show up immediately on the live site.
4. Now go to the Versions tab on the Properties tab. You should see something like this:
    
   What does this mean?
   As you can see version 6.0 of the document was published from 2:41 PM. This is the version which is currently live. Version 6.1 is an intermediate version that was saved but not published and 7.0 is the published version which is set to be published from 2:50 PM (but at the moment it is not visible as you can see from the empty Published From field).
   
   What will happen next is that around 2:50 PM (this is not an exact science) version 7.0 of the page will be published and version 6.0 will be unpublished as you will see because the Published to field will be set.

If you want to schedule multiple pages ahead of time, that is possible to: just edit the page, set a new publish from date and publish the page. One thing you cannot do is edit a page that is already published, so make sure the page is correct before you publish it.